SARS news: Killer virus identified, member of the Paramyxoviridae family. [via boingboing]

Ok, glad I’m not alone (my 2 cents) on this Hiptop SDK thing. Unfortunately I don’t don’t think Danger’s going to get the chance for someone to release an OSS hiptop; they’re gonna get smushed before then. See me ringing bells back in January on the developer forums. And just think, when last year, it seemed like Danger got it. Danger! You DON’T GET IT! Danger!

Getting custom stickers printed?

• VG Kids! – have served Jaime well
• Contagious Graphics – Random‘s vendor of choice
• Sticker Guy – cheap, but can take a long, long, time

First thought as I see the pictures on McDonald’s wi-fi: frickin’ awesome. Second thought: I wonder if he’s using a secure tunnel. I haven’t gotten to thinking about what the grease is doing to his arteries yet.

Reason enough to sign up for as a Danger developer: the SDK examples includes a program called ‘terminal’, a telnet and ssh client.

crim thinks developer dollars are a good idea:

I know many other professional development products (think filemaker, web objects, etc.) don’t have publically accessible support forums maintained by their own staff. You need to have a registered version of the product to get that support. This is sort-of the same idea, but they’re giving us a lot more.

Now, what’s interesting is that when you compare, say the two products he mentions, which have small/limited support, there are some common elements, when compared to their more succesful and open competitors (say, MySQL and PHP respectively):

1. The open communities are much more robust
2. These communities sustain larger growth
3. Gain superior mindshare
4. and community support/contributions
5. As a result the respective products are of higher quality

Is Danger a dead-end? Time will tell, I suppose.

It’s been awfully windy the past few days. Speaking of wind, last week I was doing some research after reading the Wired article on Hydrogen power, toying with the idea of wind farming.

Facts:

• NREL: National Wind Technology Center
• Wind Energy Potential in the United States (1993) – also, maps (see updated EERE and NREL maps below)

To provide 20% of the nation’s electricity, only about 0.6% of the land of the lower 48 states would have to be developed with wind turbines. Furthermore, less than 5% of this land would be occupied by wind turbines, electrical equipment, and access roads. Most existing land use, such as farming and ranching, could remain as it is now.

• Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States – see maps, including wind resource estimates and certainty ratings
• DOE Wind Energy Basics & Favorite Links

North Dakota, alone, has enough energy from class 4 and higher winds to supply 36% of the electricity of the lower 48 states.

• Wind Power America – also has some detailed U.S. State Maps of Wind Resources
• Top 20 States For Wind Energy Potential – North Dakota is #1, although there are other states w/ larger areas of Class 4+ regions
• Vermont has many areas of Class 7 wind, it borders our friendly northern neighbors in Canada

Investing:

• Investing in Wind Energy Is Not a Breeze (more investing tips from AWEA [PDF])
• American Wind Energy Association
• Windpower Monthly News Magazine

Misc / DIY

• Darrieus wind turbine analysis
• EWEB Wyoming Windpower Project
• Wind Turbine Optimizer
• EERE: Wind Energy Technologies
• Consumer Guide: Sizing Your Small Wind Turbine System
• Build Your Own Wind Turbine
• PicoTurbine Renewable Energy Windmill and Solar Projects
• Energy From the Wind
• Bergey Windpower Co

Danger has finally got their SDK sorta released. The website is buggy as all get-out (took about 6 times to signup, as WebObjects barfs if you have an address line longer than 32 characters [wow, this input stuff sure is rocket science!]). Also, you start out at Level 0 access, which, well gives you access to some docs. A danger rep posts on the forums for the reasoning.

First thoughts? If Danger is going to limit distribution of apps to 5 OTA / USB, they’re are going to be pounded into submission compared to palm and wince devices that can beam each other (wow, IR ports that actually work) or net downloads. First Program? Create a loader app to allow programs to be downloaded from the Net. And if the DangerOS really is insecure, well, if you can’t write a proper sandbox, you’re probably not in the right business.

[update] I’m now Level 1. The site is impossible to navigate due to pages lacking navigation and all the pages breaking the back button. Also, there’s a ‘Developer Dollars’ system whereby “tokens that can be traded for advice, shared code, ideas or booty.” This seems like a bad idea.

The EE geeks are out in full force on the Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls /. thread. Some pretty cool conversation.

So, here’s a little tale. I’m trying to use Aaron Boodman’s labels.js w/ my newly reinstated search box. But oddly enough, while it seems to mostly work, for some reason, the label isn’t being hidden. This seems odd since I’m not getting any errors with the insertRule/addRule.

So, what’s going on? Jesse pointed out something pretty obvious, but that had totally escaped my attention, which is that Aaron’s code is hard-coded to append rules to the last stylesheet (document.styleSheets[document.styleSheets.length-1]), which in my case, happens to be an alternate stylesheet. The ideal way to fix this is to add a new stylesheet, however there’s no standard way to do it.

What Jesse does for his bookmarklets that deal w/ styles is to use JS to create link/style nodes. Which is fine, except I’m lazy and I don’t want to bother with writing the branching code, so I did the easiest thing and wrote a for loop to add the style to all of the stylesheets.

for(i=0; i<document.styleSheets.length; i++) {

  var s = document.styleSheets[i];

  addStyleRule(s, "label", "position:absolute; visibility:hidden;");

}

[in Moz at least, you can query the styleSheet.disabled property to see which sheets are active, but, well, if you’re looping anyway…]